Who You Callin a Bird Brain?

The March issue of Discover magazine featured a delightful spread on corvid intelligence, specifically highlighting the life work of Nicky Clayton.

Back in the 1990s, her colleagues at the University of California at Davis would stay at their computers at lunchtime, but she would wander outside and watch as western scrub-jays stole bits of studentsâ€™ meals and secretively cached the food. During these informal field studies, Clayton, an experimental psychologist, noticed that the birds returned frequently to their stashes and changed their hiding places.

â€œI thought, â€˜This is odd,â€™â€ she says. â€œI assumed birds would cache for a long timeâ€”days or months. But this was for minutes.â€ She theorized that the birds were moving their caches to avoid pilfering. When food was plentiful, they grabbed as much as possible and hid it, then hid it again when they could do so without being observed by potential thieves. That behavior implied that the scrub-jays might be thinking about other birdsâ€™ potential actions, a type of flexible thinking that was supposedly beyond the capabilities of a scrub-jayâ€™s little brain.

Clayton realized that if she could capture this caching behavior in the laboratory, she might be able to decode the social cognition of birdsâ€”the way they think about one another. She might learn whether they are capable of deception, if they respond differently to individual competitors, how well they evaluate their degree of privacy, and other aspects of their mental processes.

â€œI had a lucky break with caching,â€ Clayton says. â€œI saw this as a niche, an area that other people werenâ€™t busy with that might be quite interesting. Little did I know where it would lead.â€

Scientists had already established the amazing memories of corvids, the family of birds that includes jays, crows, ravens, and nutcrackers. The Clarkâ€™s nutcracker can hide thousands of seeds at a time and has passed tests of recall up to 285 days later. Clayton sought to find out how deep those skills run. Many animals have impressive mental capabilities for certain narrow tasks, but such aptitudes seem to reflect hardwired or conditioned adaptations to specific challenges. That is distinctly different from a humanâ€™s ability to create and manipulate a flexible mental model of the world.

Within a few years of her lunchtime insight, Clayton was conducting the first experimental demonstrations of a nonÂ­human animal engaged in mental time travel. Her experiments demonstrated that scrub-jays plan for the future, recall incidents from the past, and mentally model the thinking of their peers. Since then her work has expanded even further. She has found other mental capacities in birds that rival or surpass those of any other nonhuman species and come uncannily close to abilities we thought were ours alone.

Looking beyond corvids, some animal behaviorists have examined how songbirds use grammar. And some have ventured farther down the evolutionary tree. One study attributed higher mental functions to fish, presenting evidence that African cichlids can reason inferentially. The accelerating stream of discoveries is challenging our understanding of what animal minds can do.

Claytonâ€™s work also has its fierce criticsâ€”not surprising, given the centuryâ€™s worth of debunked claims regarding animal intelligence. Shettleworth suggests that Clayton and Emery need to repeat the thieving experiment in a different way, with a large number of fresh birds divided into groups according to whether or not they have experience as thieves. â€œI think the work is provocative but not proven,â€ Shettleworth says, â€œbecause those birds have a history.â€

Nicky Claytonâ€™s fascination with birds does not end when she leaves her current day Cambridge University office. Over the years, the avian world has infiltrated her personal life as well, informing her off-hours interests in dance and social connection. And conversely, she has developed ideas related to her research by looking at bird behavior through the prism of her own experience.

About Nicky Clayton:

With a slight frame and sharp mind, Clayton likes being compared to a bird. As busy as the corvids she studies, she dances six days a week, even during university terms. And to push her metaphor further, you might say that she pays close attention to her plumage: Her dresses come from Milan, and she perches on stiletto heels day and night, whether relaxing at home, practicing salsa, or striding across the medieval flagstones of Cambridge at a breakneck speed.

Last year Clayton had a rare opportunity to bring her two sides together when Mark Baldwin, the artistic director of the London-based Rambert Dance Company, asked her to help create a contemporary dance commemorating the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwinâ€™s On the Origin of Species. She agreed and then spent weeks sorting out how to express evolution in dance. â€œI was thinking I could just give them a straight science talk, but thatâ€™s a bit boring,â€ she says. â€œGiven that I love to dance, it made sense for me to merge the two.â€

In the resulting work, titled â€œThe Comedy of Change,â€ Baldwin included a solo that evoked the bird of paradise video. Reviewers found the piece beautiful but, as with the behavior of the birds Clayton studies, a bit mysterious. One writer who attended a performance in Northampton that was primarily for schoolchildren appreciated it moreâ€”thanks no doubt to a talk Clayton gave in advance.

Clayton still glows about this experience. As a young girl she loved birds, dance, and clothes. Now she has all three, adding dance company science adviser to her list of titles and honors. All of that curiosity and optimism spills right back into her academic work, as she attempts to decode the minds of her scrub-jays. â€œI just like watching them behave,â€ she says, â€œand using that to generate ideas.â€